Why only 12% of your campaign will be understood, and what you can do to improve the odds.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I'm going to talk today about why only 12% of the messages that the government are giving about coronavirus are being understood by the population of the UK. So this episode is called Fold Britannia. Now, Osmo Antero Wio was a Finnish academic who wrote what has become known as Wio's Law. Appropriately enough, when he was a member of Parliament between 1975 and 1979, and he published them in what is called the Wianlate Jäävähän myödykin. Apologies to any Finns out there for this terrible pronunciation, but his theories over the systemic challenges facing all communication have been on display by the British Prime Minister and the cabinet ministers here and actually all over the world. Essentially, Weil's Law predicts that an audience will understand only some 12% of a message being given due to the many biases and interferences taking place whilst they're supposed to be paying their undivided attention. So his law says that communication usually fails except by accident. Now the international US media outlet CNN, following the speech by Prime Minister Johnson on the 10th of May, said that the packed London Tube trains are the latest symbol of the UK's confused coronavirus response. So the mainstream media internationally were picking up on the fact that the British public relations exercise by the government was leading to more confusion than clarification. So how is that? Let's just dive into Weir's Law, which will give us some insights into why these kind of carefully planned campaigns can go wrong. There are some basic tenets of Weir's Law. First one is, if communication can fail, it will. If communication cannot fail, it still most usually does fail. If communication seems to exceed in the intended way, there's been a misunderstanding. If you're content with your message, communication certainly fails. Point number 2: if a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage. Point number 3: there is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds. The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are, but how they seem to be. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. In other words, the further away we are, the less important that news is to us. And number seven: the more important the situation, the more probably you forgot an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago. I'll repeat that: the more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago. So now let's just address the first law. The reasons communications fail are due to multiple causes, and the problem is that they are not static but dynamic and are also not the same for everyone. Let's just take one of the biggest ones: how we speak to one another. Language is not universally held to mean the same thing by different people in spite of standardization. In addition to idioms due to regional dialects, there are the associations and the context which certain words have. Now, when I heard the new strapline in the UK, stay alert, I was thinking of the bomb alerts on the Underground and the old schoolboy joke, be alert, the country needs more lurts. Others would have had other associations. The central issue is that stay alert does not have a universal meaning for the entire audience that the Prime Minister has been addressing. But it also doesn't tell us to be alert in what way or where or when. It's too generic to be functional. So they were attempting to be generic for everybody, but their lack of specificity meant that it really wasn't a valuable message to anybody. Now, within hours, Laws 2 and 3 were going into effect on May 10th after the Prime Minister had spoken. And laws 2 and 3, just to remind you, were that if a message can be interpreted in several ways, it'll be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage. And the third is that there's always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message. So within hours of the government's announcement about lockdown measures, there were critics and commentators who created memes on the internet shared snippets of the presentations on social media, but as sound bites, and they made the 13-minute address into this smorgasbord of different anecdotes and observations. Now, those who watched the Prime Minister's address went on to explain it to the others, but as they did that, the message became more corrupted as the ambiguity of the message led to reinterpretation by those commentators. Now with social media, 4.1, the law about the, the amplification without filtration or consideration. So we often share before we think, which is why Twitter of course now have just added this new rule that we have to actually have read an article before we can share it. People started to interpret the new stay alert laws And the declining blue line of unlocking on the charts showed society had been given some PowerPoint clip art, but not really metrics beyond the R1. So if we were in favor of more exercise in public and games with the family member, we shared those parts of the message. But if we were not in favor of more exercise, or if we didn't have a family, and we were not interested in the family games, then we wouldn't have shared those key parts of the message. Now, according to Business Insider, a UK newspaper, the UK government's attempts to loosen the coronavirus lockdown were thrown into chaos after the senior member of Boris Johnson's government completely contradicted the new rules outlined by the Prime Minister. This is rule law number four, where somebody else will reinterpret what they thought they had heard. Now, rule five is that in mass communications, the important thing is not how things are, but how they seem to be. And I'll raise my own personal observations here. Firstly, during the presentation, Boris Johnson was alone in Mansion House. And it seemed as though he's still in isolation, but in very nice surroundings, unlike most people. But also that he kept on clenching his fists. Now, according to the Language Project, in one sentence, clenching the hands or balling them in a fist is a sign of repressed aggression. So if so, who is the Prime Minister having aggression towards? So One person addressing a nation which has faced lockdown in often tight quarters. The Prime Minister was living in expansive space in solitary confinement with a large chandelier, some very nice paneled rooms, no flowers, no decoration, no soft touches at all. This was a chance to give hope, and even just some other people around in the background who could have been his aides Or even some paintings on some flowers, just to make it look a little bit more homely, a little less austere. So how was the Prime Minister showing that he was alert or in tune with the reality of those people watching, often in uncomfortable surroundings in lockdown? So the graphics that the British government have been using to communicate about the lockdown have been childlike at best, and with homeschooling prevalent, I had wondered if someone had taken advantage of their children's ability to use PowerPoint to create them. Now, this is a nation, the British one, which leads the world in creativity, education, and technology, and all we've managed to have is a simple R1 formula, which I appreciate is supposed to be simple so that everyone can understand it, but is to the degree almost so simple as to have no complexity at all. The COVID alert level is R, which is the rate of infection, plus the number of infections. So the simplicity of the message, as there are about real statistics and real testing, infection and the progress of the spike. Now, we didn't get any of those kind of numbers and statistics in the government presentations, but it would have been useful to do so. There was a large, almost sort of humpback whale style diagram showing an up and then a long glide down with different steps of opening up. But the measures didn't have any any scales. There was no real time and no real number. So the opportunity to educate and to inform and to reassure the population has been missed. Now, law number 6 means that the smaller objects about to hit us are more important if they're close by than the more important ones that might be further away. So this is this idea of the inverse proportion of distance to importance. So this is why the key rules about lockdown and how they impact individuals are the most important to everybody because those are the immediate actions and the repercussions that we're all thinking about. So this is where the current lack of clarity has always been the most distressing because these are the nearest points that are dear and important to us all. So we can go to work, we can return the children to school, but not all of them. Can we go to restaurants and gyms? But There's a two-meter rule for some. Some people can go to certain places to eat, and some people cannot. And now there's a new rule where if you're a single person, you can go at another person's house to socialize, but you can't if you're a couple. So the stay alert message was not really what people needed to hear. We, of course, we're all going to stay alert. We're not going to be careless about our health or that of. The health of our loved ones. But under what circumstances should precautions be taken? Now, having made a stern threat about increased fines for violation, the Prime Minister then made it unclear what those violations would be. And as we saw then from the case of Dominic Cummings, the special counsellor to the Prime Minister, who then took trips, uh, back home to Durham Uh, and there was no ramifications at all. The conversations now really are that one, if you have to go on a visit somewhere, that you just do a Dominic Cummings. So in my desire to find the answers in the 13-minute speech to camera, I certainly fell foul of rule number 7. And just to remind you of WIO's law number 7, the more important the situation is The more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago. The charts that were used to illustrate the nature of the issue said we must have a world-beating system with fists clenched firmly on the desk, but they didn't state how much money is being invested nor the actual testing statistics. Now what we know is that the IT system that was announced in May that will be ready. Vaguely, the Prime Minister said, in time. We've learned this weekend the technology that they deployed wasn't compatible with Android and with iOS. So the system that was announced in May has been tried on the Isle of Wight and has not succeeded. It's a small note that the Prime Minister's speech was 13 minutes and 41 seconds long. 13 minutes is an unlucky number in societies in the West. And they could have maybe drawn it to 18 minutes, which at least for audiences from Asia would have been beneficial because 8 is of course considered a lucky number. So how do these messages that we're getting from the government as we go back to work, the children start to go back to school, of stay alert, how do they conform to our East-West PR mindset approach, which I outline in one of our articles on our website called The Viral PR Mindset? In there I say that we should be compassionate, Optimistic, values-based, informative, and digital. Compassionate. Yes, we got the empathy, although certainly the tie and the chandeliers and the other formalities of the government presentations so far on a Sunday evening haven't made us feel at home or resonating with the government. Have they been optimistic? Well, we'll beat this at some ill-defined time in the future with unknown resources being applied. It doesn't give a lot of reassurance. Is it values-based? Well, there was respect for sacrifices but not really a call to arms, more a threat to people who don't follow up with the rules, which of course then, as we've seen with Dominic Cummings, weren't respected. The remedial graphics and the no mentions of masks and the new task force meant that for me the Prime Minister's messaging so far has not been as informative As for example, some retailers have been. Now the digital component, which is the new app, of course, has come and gone, and there's no mention of when the new one will arrive. There hasn't been mention of using the kind of heat sensors that they use in China, for example, and Singapore. So now let's just turn our mind to why those messages will be misunderstood by the general population that are tuning in. And listening to the Prime Minister. In a statistical model explained to me by Professor and fellow Finn Jukka Korpola, while the messenger may have the best of intentions, it's the recipients who will determine the effectiveness of a message being communicated to them. And he explains why. These are the fundamental reasons why Weir's Law comes to effect, because there are a list of reasons how and why people will interpret a message to suit their own paradigm. They include their physical and emotional biases, their language, their cultural background, their age, their gender, their race, their health, the time of day they're listening to this, their anxiety levels, their perceived bias, fatigue, hearing loss, medication, intoxication, just simply not paying attention. Mr. Korpla, who is formerly of the Helsinki University of Technology, and I have been in correspondence. And what he has said to me is to clarify that a single misunderstanding in any essential area destroys the message. So if you know the arithmetic, you can see the odds are really against you. In their original calculation, they talk about there being 20 variables, and that gives a figure of just 12% of the message being understood. So we have a case where Billions of Britons haven't understood the message, but most of us have certainly not understood all of the message. Now, I'm not making political comments here, but the judgment and simplification of a message during times of crisis is not just about the person who is relaying the message, but it's also about those people who are going to be receiving the message. And how they're going to be receiving it, where they're going to be receiving it, and when. And there are very many variables that will impact their— both their receptivity to that message and their understanding and their comprehension. So we have to be careful when we're giving out messages that there's a staggeringly low chance of people understanding what we're saying, possibly as low as 12%. So as you work and we work to communicate to our audience groups, our customer base, our staff base, and our partners over the coming weeks, let us just think about WEO's Law, that if we're going to communicate, the chances are that we're going to miscommunicate. So what can we do to reduce the likelihood of miscommunication? And how can we use our body language and our sign language and our graphics to reduce the chance of miscommunication and increase the impact of the proactive COVID mindset that we need in order to make everybody feel positive, reassured, and to get back to normal life? Thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you enjoyed this, please do subscribe and give us a rating. At the bottom of the podcast list. Come to our website to subscribe to our Cognition newsletter, which goes out each Friday around the world. Thank you so much for listening. I wish you good health, profitable business, and that you keep on communicating.